What Boards Can Learn from JPMorgan’s Succession Saga

A top-performing CEO whose success justifies pushing off retirement. A board that’s content with a vague succession timeline. And next-in-line candidates who leave when the top job seems unreachable.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. may be the biggest bank in the country, but consultants see several takeaways for community bank boards from the years-long succession saga to replace legendary CEO Jamie Dimon, 70.

“It’s a proxy with some useful lessons for any bank,” says Alan Kaplan, the founder and CEO of the executive search firm Kaplan Partners. “The issues are the same.”

Fifty-one percent of bank CEOs are at least 61 years old, according to Bank Director’s 2026 Compensation & Talent Survey. Thirty percent of bank executives and board members said that they expected their CEO to retire within the next five years or less.

For at least a decade, Dimon has reportedly said he could retire in about five years. The delay has been of little consequence for JPMorgan Chase given the bank’s financial results and its deep bench to take over for Dimon, who has been CEO for more than 20 years. The race may now be a contest between two co-presidents announced in June — when the bank also announced longtime contender Marianne Lake’s retirement. JPMorgan did not return a request for comment for this story.

Retirement delays happen, consultants say. CEOs stay during boom times when the job is particularly enjoyable, plus during crisis times such as 2023 when a steady hand is needed.

The problem is that those in the running to become CEO will leave if they don’t see a clear path forward. It is the “No. 1 thing that really puts successor candidates at risk,” says Scott Petty, managing partner at the executive search firm Chartwell Partners, stressing the need to make incumbents stick to agreed-upon timelines.

After all, with more bank CEO jobs opening up soon, talented C-suite executives could get their shot elsewhere. “If they’re attractive CEO successors for you, they’re also attractive CEO successors for other banks,” Ed Steinhoff, managing director and consulting team leader at the compensation advisory Pearl Meyer.

Dealing with Disappointment
There are strategies that can help banks keep top executives even after CEOs push off retirement.

Salary and bonuses are one critical tool, but “compensation is not always the answer” to retaining successor candidates, Steinhoff says. C-suite executives may be looking for new challenges and skills they can learn, he says, such as tackling head-on what artificial intelligence means for banking or brushing up on cybersecurity functions.

“If somebody’s been a CFO for 10 years, their job today is not the same as it was years ago,” Steinhoff says. “Having somebody in that role that is able to adapt to these changes, is interested in those new challenges and has the compensation that is sufficient to keep them from always looking outside, to me, is a good combination.”

Others may want to see a “glide path” toward a CEO post by having more responsibility and management duties, says Chartwell’s Petty. A CEO, for instance, could keep the CFO as a direct report but hand off management of the chief credit officer or the human resources and technology departments.

“The main thing is showing action behind the words — that the successor is progressing towards running the whole institution over time,” Petty says.

Rock-Solid Plans
It all starts with having a strong succession plan — one that has a clear timeline for the CEO transition and clear communication with potential internal successors along the way.

“Some banks make it a whole lot more difficult than it should be or has to be, and it’s because they don’t have an orderly system,” says Rob O’Halloran, managing partner of the bank recruiting firm BDS Yarmouth & Choate. “When that uncertainty creeps in, that’s when internal candidates are saying, ‘I’m not being taken seriously. This is disrespectful.’”

Boards can pick a liaison that engages with internal candidates on benchmarks and checks in throughout the transition, helping establish a line of communication if there are indeed delays.

“While internal candidates won’t wait forever, they’ll wait longer than most boards realize, as long as they feel as if they’re part of the process,” O’Halloran says.

For many institutions, serious succession planning should often begin about three years from a CEO’s targeted retirement, says Kaplan. Bigger banks may want to plan earlier, he says, citing some examples of banks that plan seven years in advance.

The board needs to own the process, he emphasized, particularly in cases where a CEO isn’t taking his succession seriously. That can lead to uncomfortable conversations with the CEO, but avoiding those talks is an “abdication of responsibility,” he says.

“CEO succession is an independent director-led project, full stop,” he says.

Using Time Wisely
Banks need to ensure they’re being productive once the clock for a CEO succession starts ticking.

“The mistake that banks make all the time is they don’t use that time wisely,” Kaplan says.

CEO candidates should be rotated into different roles or into special assignments so they can understand other parts of the bank, he says. The industry has become siloed, he argues, a problem that banks alleviate by ensuring CEO candidates understand retail banking, commercial lending, technology, finance and other key divisions.

The key for banks is ensuring they know what type of CEO they’d like to have in the future, says Brad Jayne, a Pearl Meyer consultant who previously held a senior talent role at PepsiCo.

That way, they can identify the skills that candidates should be developing as they progress at the company, he says. Giving them that hands-on training may well mean replacing an incumbent executive who’s performing well, he says.

“It is a very hard thing to do — to remove somebody because you have a potential rising star under them,” he says. “But that’s what the best organizations do, is move people around, exit talent that is a B-plus player because there’s an A player possibility under them.”

And they’re quite aware that their ideal future CEO may not be in-house, consultants agree.

Far too often, banks pick an “internal candidate out of loyalty and not out of qualifications,” says Chartwell’s Petty. But conducting a search for a CEO helps boards ensure they’ve got a full slate of options, even if the candidate they’ve been grooming ends up being the best one.

“It may be the right choice, for sure,” he says. “But if you go out and conduct an external search — compare the internal candidates with the external candidates — then you can make a confident choice and not a default selection.”